Starring:

Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Megan Burns, Brendan Gleeson    Directed by: Danny Boyle    Written by: Alex Garland

The Story:

Man, oh man, how I waited to see this movie.

When I saw a preview of it, months ago I thought "Damn! That looks good!". Then I saw a TV commercial promising an alternate ending that was even more shocking. Now I was hooked. My Droogies, I was so hooked that when I finally got the DVD I forgot to eat dinner or speak to my wife until I had watched the flick. The lowdown? Well, the Alternate ending is bullshit. Its not scarier than the original ending. As a matter of fact, its not anything. What a bogus lie!

The movie itself? Well, its not what I expected. A lot of folks thought it was a zombie movie. Its not really a zombie movie. The monsters are infected people with some weird virus that makes them just go plain homicidal nuts. And its a brit movie, to which I say Thank goodness! God Save the Queen and Rue Britannia and all that! Why? Here's why....

If it was an American movie it would have had loads of zombies grossly ripping people apart, cardboard characters and bikini babes bearing their breasts. I like movies with that stuff, but I like tacos too. But I wouldn't want to eat tacos everyday of the week either.

In this movie, Jim, a bicycle courier wakes up in the hospital from a coma. He finds the city of London deserted. What's happened, as you can imagine he's wondering. What happened was a bunch of animal rights activists broke into a research lab and freed some monkeys. But they didn't know the monkeys were infected with a contagious virus that turns them into crazed killing machines. This was 28 days before Jim woke up. Now that he's awake Jim is understandably bewildered. He stumbles out of the hospital confused, scared and alone.....

Well not quite alone. After a little exploring Jim is attacked by a horde of raging mad infected humans! (Hey, Jim I know how ya feel! Crowds of people routinely chase me down the street!) He's rescued just in time by Mark and Selena, two survivors that throw Molotov cocktails at the infected. They take Jim back to an abandoned store they've been hiding out in and give him the lowdown on what's going on. The virus has spread throughout the UK and the last few televised reports say that Paris and New York are affected too. It looks like civilization has fallen. The infected don't care about anything else but killing anyone who isn't infected.

Jim manages to convince his two saviors to accompany him to his family's home. quite naturally he's concerned about his parents. Unfortunately they discover that the parents have taken their own lives when the end seemed near. (Its unnerving to see the two decomposing bodies lying in the bed. Far more effective than a bloody corpse....just to people that died in their sleep decomposing. Brrrr.) Later that evening when our friends are trying to rest, Jims former neighbors...now infected lunatics....break in and attack. Mark and Selena manage to destroy them, but Mark gets some of their blood splashed on an open wound. Before he can begin to change Selena slices him to itty bitty chunks with a machete. Now its just Selena and Jim trying to survive. But they soon happen upon two more survivors. Frank and his daughter, Hannah. (Hannah? you know for some reason I hate that name. Always have. I've never even known anyone named Hannah, but it just seems like an awful name for a girl, at least to me...but I digress.) Frank and Hannah live in a big high rise apartment building and are essentially trapped there, because of the infected. But Frank has heard a repeating radio message about an Army unit near Manchester. They promise protection to anyone who can hear them, but the survivors aren't sure if the recorded message is any good. After all, the message may be repeating but the army might have been overrun by the infected. They have little choice though...they don't have any water and food is running short. They take Frank's taxicab and head for Manchester.

This is where the movie slows up a bit. You may have thought this was going to be a zombie/infected/Monster-action type flick, but think again. for some time we see the survivors trying to get to Manchester intact. Yeah, they have a few run-ins with the infected, (Jim has to kill a little boy that's been infected. I guess that scene was to show us that Jim has developed a Selena-like "kill 'em, don't care" attitude.) But the real danger to our heroes occurs when the arrive in Manchester. By a quirk of fate Frank becomes infected. Just before he can attack his former comrades a squad of soldiers show up and fill him full of lead. The soldiers are under the command of Major West. West has set up a base in a mansion nearby and is looking for survivors. He even has one of his own men, Mailer chained up in a courtyard because he became infected. West wants to see how long it will take for Mailer to die of hunger. (A long time I'd wager....Mailer flails and struggles against his bonds like a man possessed...which I guess he is.) The Major has a plan...I never said it was a good one, though. You see, he wants to start civilization anew. That's why he wanted survivors to come to his location. But he needs women for that....and now that Jim, Selena and Hannah are there he doesn't want them to leave. He offers Jim a chance to be on his team, and when Jim tries to flee with Hannah and Selena he has two of his men take Jim out into the surrounding woodland to kill him. He also has one of his own men up for execution too, because he doesn't tow the line.

This is where I think a lot of people were a tad disappointed with the movie. you kind of expect it to be a zombies-taking-over-the-world movie, and it turns out to be a "Crazy guy wants to remake a shattered civilization in his own image" type of movie. Think about it...once we get to nitty-gritty of the Major west plot the infected zombie people become a footnote. The movie could have easily substituted a nuclear war, a new plague or just plain old anarchy to get to this point. But lets get back to it....Jim is about to be executed and....

....and here's where we get completely whacky. Jim survives more by luck than skill, but then Jim goes back to the mansion for Hannah and Selena. I can buy Jim using stealth and trickery to a point but he manages to beat a group of armed soldiers. It would have been easier to swallow if Jim's character had been given any dialogue or scenes to show that he's a physically capable, crafty, and strategically minded person. But up until this part Jim was sort of an everyman. All of a sudden he's a friggin' commando! Still, it wasn't all that bad. Before Jim can escape with his two female friends though, West, the only soldier left at this point shoots him. (West is soon after killed by Mailer, whom Jim freed as a distraction.) Selena and Hannah get Jim to a hospital where Selena manages to save his life. The final scene in the movie is the three survivors hiding in a cottage but using sheets on the ground to spell out hello to a recon plane that flies over. So West was wrong....civilization does exist still.

And now we have to turn to the alternate ending.

A lot of movies have them. I thought the alternate endings to final destination and Ronin were better than the endings in their theatrical releases. But this movie....My droogies, I saw a preview for this flick before it hit the theater and thought it looked kick-ass. Then I saw TV commercials claiming the end was shocking but the alternate was even more shocking! The commercial claim med that the alternate ending was so shocking that they were going to show it in the theaters along with the original ending! Now at that point I thought "THAT'S GOTTA BE DA BOMB!". I mean why else show the alternate ending also in the theater? SPOILER ALERT! If you don't want to know the "shocking" Alternate Ending, don't highlight what I'm about to say next. If you don't give a rats fuzzy ass use your mouse pointer to highlight this: The piss ass shocker is that in the ALTERNATE ending Jim dies while Selena and Hannah are trying to save him in the abandoned hospital. Then the scenes of the survivors at the cottage are edited to cut Jim out of them. That's it. And I'll be honest. I was FUCKING MAD! They hyped this up on TV so much I thought the end was gonna be brutally shocking. It wasn't. Hell, I'm sorry I watched the alternate ending! END SPOILER ALERT!

Still, just like Dog Soldiers, I liked this UK take on zombies. (If you can call them zombies.) The movie didn't quite live up to its hype but it was still good enough, and really a lot better than most US horror films I've seen lately.

Best Lines:  “Mark had plans. You got plans? What, you think we'll find a cure, save the world? Or maybe just fall in love and fuck? Plans are pointless - staying alive's as good as it gets.” -Selena tells Jim the hard truth about their situation.

Are you kidding me?

1.) I had a horrible day, the day I saw this movie....I usually come home from work mentally and physically exhausted, and on a really rough day...which is per the norm for me....I'm just flat out fed up with the entire world. So when Jim first awakens in the hospital and finds he is totally alone....no one, not one person is around...I thought "That lucky bastard!". Of course I didn't really mean that. Think about how unnerving that would be! To wake up and find out that everyone else has gone missing! Jim holds out pretty well I think. I'd have probably gone nuts within the first five minutes.

2.) Lets talk about these infected monkeys. The scientist that interrupts the animal rights terrorists says "In order to make a cure you have to understand the disease!" (paraphrasing)  to explain why these monkeys have been infected. But wait a ding dang minute. How the hell did the virus come about? It practically has to be man-made even though that's not actually said in the movie. An infected person changes into a crazy zombiac mother f***er within 30 seconds! If a virus like that occurred naturally it would have swept over the world way before we knew what was going on! So the scientists must have created the virus. That seems odd...why would they create it?

3.) The monkeys are kept in these glass cages, unshackled. If they're so dangerous why aren't they restrained in some way? Or at least muzzled.

4.) Why don't the infected attack each other? They act almost like a team. A really disorganized team, but they seem to attack in swarms. This is some virus. It makes you go completely berserk, so berserk that you don't eat, wipe your ass, or anything else but try to kill everyone else but you also will loosely work with anyone else that doesn't eat, wipe their ass or anything else!

5.) You know, Selena is really, really cool. Scary, but cool. I mean, she's hot...the actress playing her, Naomie Harris, is gorgeous....but Selena's got a cold blooded side. When her friend Mark becomes infected she doesn't wait one freaking second to kill him in the most direct and brutal way possible. (She hacks him to bits in all of 30 seconds....with a big f***ing machete!) Selena also makes it clear to Jim that if he becomes a liability she'll throw him to the wolves...and she's as good as her word. When infected crazies start chasing them and Jim has a hard time keeping up, he starts pleading for Selena to wait for him...and she doesn't! (Don't worry, Jim makes it in that scene) But you know the thing I find hottest about Selena...that accent. Man oh man, I love those brit accents on girls. Don't get me started on that.....hey, I wonder if Americans sound odd to brits? (One of my old girlfriends, who was English, told me I had a strong accent...which amused me....because I thought it was her that had the accent)

Nudity and Sex: None

Huh?:

Jim has been in a coma for at least 28 days. Now, we can't be sure when the hospital staff left him there, but I'm guessing they left in a really big hurry. If not they would have taken him or any other helpless patient with them. But we can at least guess its been more than a week judging by the condition of the hospital. But then, how did Jim stay alive? I'm not a doctor, but don't people in comas need some kind of care, daily? To be fed? To be cleaned up? You still gotta use the bathroom, coma or not. Jim doesn't seem to be starving or have crapped all over himself by the time he wakes up.

Jim.... a bicycle courier....defeats a squad of armed and trained soldiers? Oh-kay.....

Major West's observations of his infected man, Mailer, conclude him to believe that infected will eventually starve to death because they don't produce anything...they just go around acting crazy and homicidal. Wait...they don't even bother to feed themselves? How do they survive then? How long can a person physically be a threat if they don't eat? Most people I know would be too tired and weak with hunger within a week to pose a really big threat.

Exactly how did the infection get all the way to Paris and New York from the UK? A slavering, homicidal maniac would stand out at an airport.

You may notice that there are NO screen caps of the infected on this page. The reason is simple. In the movie the Infected are shot in a speeded up, quickly edited manner, which does make them seem fantastically dangerous. Cool! You only get fast glimpses of them to make them seem more frightening. So I didn't include any screen caps of them to maintain that suspense. Aw, who am I kidding....listen, I was just too damn lazy to try and pause the movie long enough to get decent screen caps of them! OK, you got me!

The Final Judgment: Well,  the Infernal Hordes were pissed off about the bull crap alternate ending. If not for that this movie might have gotten five devil heads! But because of it the Inferno has knocked it down to three. (Not 4, because the ads hyped this flick so much, it was a let down....it wasn't bad, but it was a let down!)